Logging updates for RPM 6.2

Submitted by Dave Brooks on Wed, 07/04/2018 - 09:06

RPM Remote Print Manager® ("RPM") logs everything of interest, in various levels of detail. We log when jobs arrive, when they are processed, and of course all manner of errors and warnings. We also have a diagnostic log which can be useful to the technicians and developers.

Message content improvements

We studied some massive customer logs and identified a number of ways our logs could be more useful for problem resolution, or simply identifying normal behavior. In general, we added contextual data to many log messages:

We now associate a queue name with a device name in the device tester logs, so if you use the same device in multiple queues (a typical situation) you can track down which setup you need to check

We discovered that the message log insert was attempting to purge old log entries each time we added. We eliminated that overhead and added a scheduled task within RPM that would purge old log entries each hour. You can set the duration of log messages in the user interface.

This significantly reduced the impact of logging.

Job execution logging

We added real-time logging for job execution. We use a custom script to accomplish this. We do not plan to release a tool publicly.

PCL5 related logging

The PCL Resources transform will now log all trays and bins in the input file to the event log only once, at the end of the file. Previously it logged each occurrence.

The "missing macro" warning for PCL5 files is now logged once at the end of the input files. All missing macro ids are listed.

We now list the job name and macro ID for any PCL macro related messages, if you have turned on logging for that transform

Windows version logging

We added support to log the operating system version for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016.